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Read more...If Amazon had its way, the company would have drones buzzing overhead at all hours of the day, ready to deliver your packages whenever you needed them. The FAA has had other ideas about that, namely that that maybe should never actually happen, so Amazon has been forced to be creative and come up with other ways to get goods to its customers in a timely fashion.
Here's one I can tell you I honestly never thought of: on-demand 3D printing.
But that is exactly what Amazon has in mind, according to a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (unearthed by Geekwire).
It would work pretty much as you'd expect: a user would request an item, choosing a delivery method, along with 3D printing instructions. Those instructions would then be sent to a truck, which would have the 3D printer on board. it would print out the item and deliver it to the customer.
There are numerous benefits to this kind of experiment, most importantly the time savings involved.
"Time delays between receiving an order and shipping the item to the customer may reduce customer satisfaction and affect revenues generated," Amazon says in the patent application.
"Accordingly, an electronic marketplace may find it desirable to decrease the amount of warehouse or inventory storage space needed, to reduce the amount of time consumed between receiving an order and delivering the item to the customer, or both."
Amazon is in heavy competition with other services to get items delivered as quickly as possible, especially Google, with its Shopping Express same-day delivery service, which was unveiled in 2013.
In December, Amazon stepped its game up even further, launching Prime Now, a new one-hour delivery service available only for members of Amazon Prime. The company offers two-hour delivery on tens of thousands of "daily essentials," such as paper towels, shampoo, books, toys, televisions, headphones and batteries for free.
Getting items delivered in one-hour will cost extra: delivery is available for $7.99.
On-demand 3D printing is not Amazon's only idea for how to get items to its customers faster than its competitors:it has also begun testing out a way to deliver packages by taxi, through a partnership with Flywheel, a ride-for-hire app that integrates into existing taxis and fleets.
In my predictions for 2015 I mentioned that this would be the year that people would actually start to care about 3D printing, after years of being told that it would be this amazing technology that would change the world.
Part of the reason it hasn' so fart, I believe, is because of cost, but that soon will not be an issue: Gartner is saying that prices of 3D printers will fall 98% in 2015. That kind of price cut not only makes it feasble for the average person to buy a 3D printer, but for a company like Amazon tomake 3D printing a cornerstone of its business.
It should be noted that, while the patent was published this week for all of us to see, it was actually filed all the way back in November 2013. So obviously the company has had this idea for a long time, but its unclear at the moment how far along it is, or when it might unveil this kind of service.
VatorNews has reached out to Amazon, but the company declined to comment further.
(Image source: pdfaiw.uspto.gov)
The app will officially lanch on Web, iOS and Android April 3rd
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